Hell yes! Clean out the corporate-and-special-interest-bought Dems, and get real progressives in.

No, this is different. OpenCore refers to when part of an application is open source, but major functionality or components of the application itself are not.

ElasticSearch is this way, where the elasticsearch package itself is fully open source (AGPL), but you have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for its SIEM addon.

What OP is talking about wrt discord is not actually non-FOSS at all, it’s purely about the community (support, discussions, and documentation), nothing about the application itself.

Even the Steam integration does not change the status of the source code itself; OP could fork it and remove the Steam integration.

They may not have (publicly known) info sharing agreements with the US, but they’re not adversaries either. China is.

Rom got his redemption arc though, he turned into an actually good dad later!

Get a VPS in Hong Kong. Set up your own point-to-point VPN (OpenVPN, wireguard tunnel) on it. Is the Chinese government spying on you via the VPS stack itself? Sure, probably. But they’ll laugh their assess off at a US govt. request to turn over that data.

This is an oversimplification that ends up being deceptive by coincidence, because hardware is supposed to drastically reduce in price as it becomes standardized and mass-produced, and game consoles and computers both did this.

That we’re now back to the point where a console costs nearly the same as the adjusted cost of the very first, hyper-niche, hyper-bespoke hardware units in the 80s, is a HUGE regression. Prices aren’t “in-line with” the Atari prices because that’s just how they scale, they’re there by chance as they spike upwards due to supply constraints driven by AI.

“Even though we’ve lost all engines and are in a nose dive, we’re currently at 300ft, which is in line with a normal landing approach altitude.”

I’m against AI art because that is going to be used to degrade not just the value of artists’ labor, but the actual art being viewed itself, because the people who will be choosing what looks “better” are the same marketing and business execs with no taste who have been turning out non-AI CGI slop for 15 years+. They’ll become a filter that slowly converges everything towards the im-14-and-this-is-cool Marvel-ification of media that we’re already wallowing in.

Just like how “Millennial Grey” was foisted onto us who cannot even afford to buy homes, and effectively blamed on us, AI Coke Bear will somehow end up being our “choice” of art too.

But this gotcha is nothing new; I remember people doing this to troll bozos who claimed they could spot photoshops back in the early 2000s. People playing the “I can spot AI because it’s so bad” aren’t being “blinded” by their anti-ai hatred or something, they just want a reason to play at being smart online. I guarantee you this is not the only thing they become instant “experts” in when there’s online controversies.

Ignoring that Bloom’s Taxonomy is outdated and disproven (not that it was ever based on empirical data)…

students are supposed to get to the application point in undergrad and that college is supposed to provide that practice

This hasn’t been true for a long time, ime; colleges have mostly been about laying foundations for years, ever since we moved to a gen-ed system that disfavored any kind of specialized learning at the cost of any usable skills (and since defunding and prison-ifying high schools made even gen-ed baselines not happen in practice). They’ve been having to make up for what kids aren’t getting in high school, but that also means that by the time they leave with an undergrad they have almost no experience of applying their knowledge to real-world-repevant problems.

It is not clear to me if democracy can survive a deregulated Internet. A deregulated Internet filled with LLMs that can perfectly impersonate human beings powered by unregulated corporations with zero ethical guidelines seems like a somewhat obvious problem.

Nah, no thanks. The idea that we have to allow government control of online spaces in order to a make them safer, rather than just government-ideology-aligned, is an insane thing to be believing in 2026.

Yeah, let’s have Trump’s FCC decide what is acceptable speech and what’s dangerous. Decide the ethical code that provides “sufficient justification to unleash it on the world”. I’m sure it won’t be “is it enriching conservatives or promoting our ideology?”.

Great plan.

ah yes, the continuing fantasy that the declining birthrate among white Americans is some shadowy conspiracy or cultural threat (which it is, if your “culture” is just White Supremacy) rather than no one wanting to raise a kid with some right-wing neanderthals (or having the money to do it anyways).

“If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically persuade women to be baby factories consensually, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy consent.”

You’re misunderstanding my position.

Right now, schools are not learning institutions that are trying but struggling to enrich kids. They’re a penal institution, punishing kids for being non-productive members of society, funneling many of them directly into military or prison, and actively making their lives worse than if they were sitting at home or hanging out with friends outside.

Every kid thinks that when they’re in school, but in most places they’re not correct; here they often are.

I think you can draw a pretty direct and causal line from the prison-ification of schools and increasing school shootings, NCLB being the instigating national change, but Republican anti-education policies in general being heavy contributors (and Red states are far worse than Blue states in this).

Bear in mind this is not some “school is bad” stance: there are actually a lot of schools numerically which are wonderful places of learning. Expensive private schools and high-income-neighborhood-servicing public schools don’t allow that kind of disruptive policing and aren’t looking for every opportunity to punish children as a show of dominance and teaching forced-submission. But numerically high does not equate to high percentage, and they’re a minuscule percent of the overall count of schools in America (115,000+).

So this is not a “don’t fix small problem until we fix big problem” issue. This is a “don’t pretend that these are students and not prisoners, and take away one of the few remaining joys most of them have”.

Taking away phones isn’t fixing a small problem, it’s making the bigger problem worse.

They’re being invaded.

Addiction usually forms around something that is used for escaping one’s problems. True here as well.

And yes, most people are unhappy in life, right now especially.

Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine…

In a just world, they’d be intervening to stop an ongoing invasion and occupation.

In today’s “wait, they were still alive?” news

haha, indeed. Ted Turner is a name I remember hearing referred to in the past-tense when I was a kid.

Hating work is not why adults look at their phones nor is it hating [commuting]

Um, ya sure about that?

Yes, phones are distracting, but distraction is entirely about competing levels of interest, and phones are more interesting than most people’s work or commute, and certainly than modern classrooms.

I didn’t realize you’re in Canada, and I fully admit I know nothing about Canadian schools or the education system there.

In the US, we have military recruiters in schools, armed officers patrolling halls, metal detectors and backpack checks (for the schools that don’t require transparent backpacks), and random locker searches. And this was all from before Trump.

Edit: oh, I forgot my (least) favorite new rule: no talking in the hallway between classes, though it seems like the UK leaned into that more heavily than the US has.

It’s a cage for kids, not a place to learn, and it is significantly different than when I was very young. 9/11 happened when I was in middle school, and even in the subsequent 6 years until I graduated high school, it had gone downhill fast.

My partner is a teacher, as well.

it is 100% impossible to teach someone when they have a phone in their hand

Yes, but this is a symptom of structural problems with our school system. Looking at phones didn’t make kids hate school. Hating school made kids want to look at their phones.

Schools have been shifting from places of learning, which requires exploration, to places of compliance and regurgitation. And it’s not just about the shift towards obedience-based, rote memorization in service of standardized testing (or how schools care about attendance only for funding reasons), we’ve even shifted the literal architectural design philosophy behind how we construct school buildings to be more prison-like.

The pandemic lockdown was horrible for kids, but the rush to reopen schools wasn’t about the negative impact it was having on their social development, it was about serving business interests who wanted their parent-employees back at work. They wanted the childrens’ holding cells reopened.

When we actually start shifting schools back towards environments of learning, at a structural level, I will have sympathy for the mission of education over sympathy for the disinterested inmates students.

I’d rather make a benign Linux distro feel like a windows version I like, than papering over a hostile Win11.